A very agreeable commercial treaty with China was arranged in 1868.
Grant and Colfax, Republicans, succeeded Andrew Johnson in the next election, Horatio Seymour, of New York, and Frank P. Blair, of Missouri, being the Democratic nominees. Virginia and Mississippi had not been fully reconstructed, and so were not yet permitted to vote. They have squared the matter up since, however, by voting with great enthusiasm.
In 1869 the Pacific Railroad was completed, whereby the trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific—three thousand and three hundred miles—might be made in a week. It also attracted the Asiatic trade, and tea, silk, spices, and leprosy found a new market in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Still flushed with its success in humorous legislation, Congress, on the 30th of March, 1870, passed the Fifteenth Amendment, giving to the colored men the right to vote. It then became a part of the Constitution, and people who have seen it there speak very highly of it.
Prosperity now attracted no attention whatever. Gold, worth nearly three dollars at the close of the war, fell to a dollar and ten cents, and the debt during the first two years of this administration was reduced two hundred million dollars.
Genuine peace reigned in the entire Republic, and o'er the scarred and shell-torn fields of the South there waved, in place of hostile banners, once more the cotton and the corn. The red foliage of the gum-tree with the white in the snowy white cotton-fields and the blue-grass of Kentucky (blue-grass is not, strictly speaking, blue enough to figure in the national colors, but the author has taken out a poetic license which does not expire for over a year yet, and he therefore under its permission is allowed a certain amount of idiocy) showed that the fields had never forgotten their loyalty to the national colors. Peace under greatly changed conditions resumed her vocations, and, in the language of the poet,—
"There were domes of white blossoms where swelled the white tent;
There were ploughs in the track where the war-wagons went;
There were songs where they lifted up Rachel's lament."
October 8, 1871, occurred the great fire in Chicago, raging for forty-eight hours and devastating three thousand acres of the city. Twenty-five thousand buildings were burned, and two hundred million dollars' worth of property. One hundred thousand people lost their houses, and over seven and one-half millions of dollars were raised for those who needed it, all parts of the world uniting to improve the joyful opportunity to do good, without a doubt of its hearty appreciation.
Boston also had a seventy-million dollar fire in the heart of the wholesale trade, covering sixty acres; and in the prairie and woods fires of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, many people lost not only their homes but their lives. Fifteen hundred people perished in Wisconsin alone.
In 1871 the damage done by the Alabama, a British-built ship, and several other cruisers sent out partly to facilitate the cotton trade and partly to do a little fighting when a Federal vessel came that way, was assessed at fifteen million five hundred thousand dollars against Great Britain by the arbitrators who met at Geneva, Switzerland, and the northwestern boundary line between the United States and British America was settled by arbitration, the Emperor of Germany acting as arbitrator and deciding in favor of America.